The German Golfer Story That Convinced Donald Trump Voter Fraud Is Real

Donald Trump is absolutely convinced there is massive voter fraud going on in the United States — even though he was just elected President. Of the United States. Trump also believes that the Democrats are benefitting from voter fraud since most if not all all of the people voting illegally are illegal immigrants. But if that were true, wouldn’t Hillary Clinton have been elected instead?

Donald Trump wants a study done to find out how many illegal voters there really are. Trump says, he would have won the election by up to 2 million votes, instead of losing the popular vote by 3 million. By his own estimate, there were 3-5 million illegal votes cast, apparently all of them were cast for Hillary Clinton. According to Trump’s theory, if all of these illegal voters hadn’t voted, he would have had more votes than Hillary.

So where did Donald Trump come up with this information? Or is it just another urban myth, which is the original source of online fake news?Well it turns out that a golfer named Bernhard Langer told him about an experience he had while voting in the last election. According to Langer, he saw a lot of people on line to vote who obviously did not belong there. And when he tried to vote, they wouldn’t let him.

Sounds legit, right? After all, you can just look at people and tell whether they are registered to vote or not. Actually, no you can’t. Voters look like anyone you might ass on the street. How could it be that a German golfer could tell that one some voters are registered and another is not just by looking at them, yet the people who man the poles can’t tell the difference?

Here’s another problem with Trump’s story: Bernhard Langer is German, and he isn’t even registered to vote in the United States.

Here’s another problem with Trump’s story: according to Bernhard Langer’s own daughter, her father is not a friend of Donald Trump and would have no reason to talk to him, much less tell him this kind of false story.

The bottom line: This story is an urban myth, or an urban legend, also known as fake news, a tall tale told by a President with a tenuous grasp of the truth who likes to tell anecdotes to prove his point. Because when you don’t have facts to back up your story, just tell an anecdote that was told to you by someone else, making it almost impossible to corroborate, just like many urban myths.

The witnesses described the story this way: Mr. Langer, a 59-year-old native of Bavaria, Germany — a winner of the Masters twice and of more than 100 events on major professional golf tours around the world — was standing in line at a polling place near his home in Florida on Election Day, the president explained, when an official informed Mr. Langer he would not be able to vote.

Ahead of and behind Mr. Langer were voters who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote, Mr. Trump said, according to the staff members — but they were nonetheless permitted to cast provisional ballots. The president threw out the names of Latin American countries that the voters might have come from.

Mr. Langer, whom he described as a supporter, left feeling frustrated, according to a version of events later contradicted by a White House official.

The anecdote, the aides said, was greeted with silence, and Mr. Trump was prodded to change the subject by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, and Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

Just one problem: Mr. Langer, who lives in Boca Raton, Fla., is a German citizen with permanent residence status in the United States who is, by law, barred from voting, according to Mr. Langer’s daughter Christina.

“He is a citizen of Germany,” she said, when reached on her father’s cellphone. “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.”

She said her father was “very busy” and would not be able to answer any questions.